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The Importance of Social Media for Photographers

Social Media has been around since the beginning of the internet, evolving from things like group emails, chatrooms and discussion forums to giant platforms like Facebook and Twitter. However, it wasn’t until recently that it became a critical component for almost all businesses, including photography studios.

The definition of social media encompasses all websites and applications that enable users to create and share content with others. While many websites and applications fall under this definition, we’re going to focus our attention on the 5 that have the biggest impact on photography businesses: 1) Facebook 2) Instagram 3) Google Plus 4) Pinterest 5) Twitter.

Why Social Media Is Important

You might be thinking that social media is not for you. Maybe you’re weary of the ever-changing privacy landscape or maybe you think it’s only a place for teenagers to gossip and post “selfies.” But here are some reasons why social media is critical to your photography studio.

  1. Speed of Communication – A social media presence allows you to communicate directly with your clients and your fans with speed and ease. Now, your clients and fans can stay up to date with your latest work the moment it’s published.
  2. Personal Connections & Feedback – With social media, you are able to interact on a personal level, leading to stronger connections to your fans and clients. These advocates are the first ones to give you honest feedback, the first ones to hit the “share” button and the first ones to recommend your work.
  3. Impressions and Consistent Reminders – You have the opportunity to consistently remind your network of your services and your work. As long as you’re tactful along the way, these impressions will help your business come to mind when they, or their friends, need photography services.
  4. Reach – Social media companies are valued in the billions because of their high number of active users. Done the right way, your social media can be like owning a store in your client’s favorite shopping center or placing an advertisement in your client’s favorite magazine. If your clients are spending a large chunk of their day on a social network, you should be there too.
  5. Distribution – On social media, your work has a chance of getting shared and distributed organically. This is referred to as “viral,” and on social media the process starts with a simple click of a button. On Facebook it’s called the “share” button, while on Twitter it’s a “retweet.” While each network might have a different name, all of them encourage the process and make it incredibly easy.
  6. Recommendations – A person seeing something that is shared is being directly recommended the content by a friend. As a result, the process of sharing has a chance to be much more effective than any other form of advertising. Oh yeah, and all of this marketing power is free.
  7. Analytics and Research – Social Media gives you concrete numbers that can help you make decisions in your business. You can simply ask a question and collect responses. You can look into the insights and analytics of your page, which most of these social networks provide for free, to see your fans’ age groups, locations, gender, and more. Understanding your clients is critical to the success of your business and social media provides you with a great way to do so.
  8. Credibility – Strong social media numbers gives you credibility and establishes a sense of authority for your prospective clients. Imagine comparing a photography studio with 10,000 Facebook likes to one with 50. That business with 10,000 just seems more established, more popular, and more successful. Of course, this could be very far from the truth, but you can never discount the importance of client perception and initial impressions.
  9. Direct Tie-in to SEO – We’ve established the importance of social media as a web marketing tool, but how does social media and SEO directly tie together? Social Media has recently emerged as a new piece of the organic SEO equation, meaning actions within Social Media networks can directly affect your organic SEO results. For now, the specifics are not important because if you simply follow the best practices outlined in this section and grow your social media presence organically, the benefits will cross over to organic search without needing to focus on the ever-changing nuances of how the two relate.

    10. CHAPTER 1.01 – INTRODUCTION

    CHAPTER 2: 1.02 – SEO BASICS & KEYWORD STRATEGY

    CHAPTER 3 1.03 – CREATING CONTENT

    CHAPTER 4: 1.04 – SITE STRUCTURE

    Chapter 5: 1.05 – ACCESSIBILITY, SPEED, AND DUPLICATE CONTENT

    Chapter 6: 2.01 – LINK BASICS

    Chapter 7: 2.02 – LINK VALUE FACTORS

    Chapter 8: 2.03 – NOFOLLOW, RELATED LINKS, & ANCHOR TEXT

    Chapter 9: 2.04 – LINK BUILDING STRATEGIES

    Chapter 10: 3.01 – THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

    Chapter 11: 3.02 – MAXIMIZING SPECIFIC SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS

    Chapter 12: 3.03 – MASTER LOCAL SEARCH

    Chapter 13: 4.01 – Initial Decisions

    Chapter 14: 4.02 – WORDPRESS AND Squarespace

    Chapter 15: 4.03 – GOOGLE ANALYTICS

    Chapter 16: PAID DIRECTORIES

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